Unexpected mass acquisition of Dirac fermions at the quantum phase transition of a topological insulator

TL;DR

This study reveals that Dirac fermions in a topological insulator can acquire mass spontaneously during a quantum phase transition without explicit symmetry breaking, indicating a condensed-matter analog of the Higgs mechanism.

Contribution

It demonstrates the unexpected mass acquisition of Dirac fermions in a topological insulator system during a phase transition, without breaking time-reversal symmetry.

Findings

Dirac fermions become massive before the topological phase transition.

Massive Dirac states appear spontaneously without explicit symmetry breaking.

The results suggest a condensed-matter Higgs-like mechanism.

Abstract

The three-dimensional (3D) topological insulator is a novel quantum state of matter where an insulating bulk hosts a linearly-dispersing surface state, which can be viewed as a sea of massless Dirac fermions protected by the time-reversal symmetry (TRS). Breaking the TRS by a magnetic order leads to the opening of a gap in the surface state and consequently the Dirac fermions become massive. It has been proposed theoretically that such a mass acquisition is necessary for realizing novel topological phenomena, but achieving a sufficiently large mass is an experimental challenge. Here we report an unexpected discovery that the surface Dirac fermions in a solid-solution system TlBi(S1-xSex)2 acquires a mass without explicitly breaking the TRS. We found that this system goes through a quantum phase transition from the topological to the non-topological phase, and by tracing the evolution of the electronic states using the angle-resolved photoemission, we observed that the massless Dirac state in TlBiSe2 switches to a massive state before it disappears in the non-topological phase. This result suggests the existence of a condensed-matter version of the "Higgs mechanism" where particles acquire a mass through spontaneous symmetry breaking.